The Socialist Utopia

From the English Eclectic blog of Paul Halsall, a socialist historian, in somewhat self-deluding response to Iain Dale's suggestion that we might have to cut public spending:

'I would expect that within less than 10 years we will have the computing ability to make effective economic planning possible and ditch the drang und sturm of imaginary "rational markets."'

I'm not sure which is worse, the complete impossibility or the utter undesirability of this prediction. It can't and won't happen, but if it could, would you want to live in a world where central government can read your thoughts and predict the future, and determines what is right for all of us on that basis, making our freedom of choice redundant? That's a dystopia to rival -Brave New World- and -1984-.